Dear Dickheads – April 2014

Dear (Feminist) Dickheads:
Are you beautifulgenital-heads familiar with social media ‘pranksters’ Andrew Hales and Stuart Edge? These two actual dicks-for-heads are Provo-based collaborative ‘pranksters’ whose comedic oeuvre largely consists of preying on women in public spaces, usually in heavily-trafficked pedestrian areas on local college campuses. For example, in their video “Sweeping Girls Off Their Feet” (4-1/2 million views since Sept. 2103!) the pair prowls the hallways of UVU literally sweepin’—(go ahead, I’m going to be sick to my stomach if I write that again). All of the women—at least the ones that made a good show for these dudes—are all jumped from behind and shrug off the incident as an awkward inconvenience. Hales tries the assault on a cis-dude and he’s not having it, so they respectfully lay off. On his own YouTube page Hales calls it assault, writing this: “aka literally picking up chicks, this is one of those campus-only ideas that borders along assault, luckily everyone responded positively.” No borders are respected here—this is sexual assault—actual non-consensual, physical violation of a person’s bodily and psychic space. Women are absolutely not objects to be made into comedy pranks at the wishes of voyeuristic dudes with camcorders. The larger point here being: Edge performed his “Magic Kissing Card Trick” (yuck-gross-ewww) on Jimmy Fallon’s Late Night last year and both he and Hales are sustaining a massive following, spawning copycats around the globe. So, when the time comes to review these ‘locals’ here at home, can all SLUGers agree to preempt their predatory antics at every occasion and resist their terrible brand of exploitative comedy? RESIST PSYCHIC DEATH.
–xRiotgrrrlx93@aol.com

Dear xRiotgrrrlx93,
Yeah, we agree that Hales and Edge are definitely a couple of slimy, hetero-normative male chauvinists who are violating other students’ space—it’s a shame that they’ve received such a following. We’ve determined that the solution is to stop going to college. There are way too many bros. Of course, we’re going to have to eschew people’s main exposure to feminist ideology and terms like “cis” and “psychic space” found in Gender Studies classes, but fuck it—we can just go to college at Boing! House. We don’t even have to call it “college” anymore—we can call it “vagina flourish realization” (intentionally without any capital letters, lest we invoke phallic grapheme imagery). We can eliminate all the phalli in our life—we won’t even have to talk in class because tongues resemble phalluses, too. We can even change “class” to “Irigaray lip conversation.” Crap, wait … nobody knows what the fuck we’re talking about. Riotgrrl, we love your intentions, however, this rhetoric is too rooted in the lofty lexicon of humanities academia, and all the UVU kids are going to give us blank stares. #youwenttocollege
xoxo,
SLUG Mag

Dear Dickheads,
What do you know about pre-grad school stress? AM I GOING TO GET A JOB IN THE MEANWHILE?! WILL I BE ABLE TO FEED MYSELF WITHOUT AN EXCLUSIVELY DUMPSTER DIET?!  And what about the GRE? Or, should I say, the ‘let’s-see-if-you-can-remember-everything-from-your-sophomore-year-of-high-school-math-while-trapped-in-a-fluorescently-lit-room-exam’. DO THESE THINGS EVEN MATTER? What if my personality is completely gone by the time it’s over? What if I end up in a shitty 9 to 5 job and I’m forever surrounded by fluorescent lights and MISERY? My life might be over before it begins….
–Fitzgerald Academia

Dear Fitz,
You’re fucked!
xoxo,
SLUG Mag

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Fax: 801.487.1359 • Mailing Address: Dear Dickheads c/o SLUG Mag • 351 Pierpont Ave. Ste. 4B SLC, UT 84101 or dickheads@slugmag.com

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